Daily Inspiration Quote by David O. McKay

McKay pits nature's easiest miracle against humanity's hardest work. The sunrise is automatic, reliable, almost indifferent: darkness yields on schedule. By contrast, "the blackness" he names malice, hatred, bigotry, selfishness does not obey physics. It clings, chosen and cultivated. The line works because it refuses the comforting metaphor that time heals and light equals progress. Morning can arrive and people can still wake up committed to harm.

As a clergyman, McKay is doing more than moral scolding; he's drawing a boundary around what religion (and, by extension, any ethical community) must actually confront. The subtext is a warning against passive optimism: you can build cities, expand education, even celebrate modernity's "dawn", and still reproduce prejudice in brighter rooms. The list is deliberate. "Malice" and "hatred" feel personal, hot-blooded; "bigotry" and "selfishness" scale up into social structure and civic habit. He's mapping the spectrum from private vice to public damage.

Context matters here. McKay led the LDS Church through mid-century America, an era fond of sunshine narratives: postwar prosperity, technological triumph, national self-mythology. Yet the period also carried the glaring contradictions of segregation, Cold War paranoia, and exclusion dressed up as tradition. His image punctures the era's promotional lighting. The real test of a society isn't whether it can produce dawn, but whether it can produce conscience and then act on it.